The Misses Mallett | Page 3

a sort of

stupidity which was not without attraction, but which would be
wearying for a whole life. She had no desire to be his wife and the
mistress of Sales Hall, its fields and woods and farms. The world was
big, the possibilities in life were infinite, and she felt she was fit,
perhaps destined, to play a larger part than this he offered her, and if
she could, as she foresaw, only play a greater one through the agency of
some man, she must have that man colossal, for she was only
twenty-three years old.
'No,' she said firmly, 'we are not suited to each other.'
'You are to me.' His angry helplessness seemed to darken the sunlight.
'You are to me. No one else. I've known you all my life. Rose, think
about it!'
'I shall--but I shan't change. I don't believe you really love me, Francis,
but you want some one you can growl at legitimately. I don't think you
would find me satisfactory. Another woman might enjoy the privilege.'
He made a wild movement, startling to the horse. 'You don't understand
me!'
'Well, then, that ought to settle it. And now I'm going.'
'Don't go,' he pleaded. 'And look here, you might have loosened your
girths.'
'I might, but I didn't expect to be here so long. I didn't expect to be so
pleasantly entertained.' She put out her hand for his shoulder, and,
bending unwillingly, he received her foot.
'You needn't have said that,' he muttered, 'about being entertained.'
'You're so ungracious, Francis.'
'I can't help it when I care so much.'
From her high seat she looked at him with a sort of envy. 'It must be
rather nice to feel anything deeply enough to make you rude.'
'You torture me,' he said.
She was hurt by the sight of his suffering, she wished she could give
him what he wanted, she felt as though she were injuring a child, yet
her youth resented his childishness: it claimed a passion capable of
overwhelming her. She hardened a little. 'Good-bye,' she said, 'and if I
were you, I should certainly go abroad.'
'I shall!' he threatened her.
'Good-bye, then,' she repeated amiably.
'Don't go,' he begged in a low voice. 'Rose, I don't believe you know

what you are doing, and you've always loved the country, you've
always loved our place. You like our house. You told me once you
envied us our rookery.'
'Yes, I love the rookery,' she said.
'And you'd have your own stables and as many horses as you wanted--'
'And milk from our own cows! And home-laid eggs!'
'Ah, you're laughing at me. You always do.'
'So you see,' she said, bending a little towards him, 'I shouldn't make a
very good companion.'
'But I could put up with it from you!' he cried. 'I could put up with
anything from you.'
She made a gesture. That was where he chiefly failed. The colossal
gentleman of her imagination was a tyrant.
* * * * *

She rode home, up and along the track, on to the high road with its
grass borders and across the shadows of the elm branches which striped
the road with black. It was a long road accompanied on one side and for
about two miles by a tall, smooth wall, unscalable, guarding the privacy
of a local magnate's park. It was a pitiless wall, without a chink,
without a roughness that could be seized by hands; it was higher than
Rose Mallett as she sat on her big horse and, but for the open fields on
the other side where lambs jumped and bleated, that road would have
oppressed the spirit, for the wall was a solid witness to the pride and
the power of material possession. Rose Mallett hated it, not on account
of the pride and the power, but because it was ugly, monstrous, and so
inhospitably smooth that not a moss would grow on it. More vaguely,
she disliked it because it set so definite a limit to her path. She was
always glad when she could turn the corner and, leaving the wall to
prolong the side of the right angle it made at this point, she could take a
side road, edging a wooded slope. That slope made one side of the
gorge through which the river ran, and, looking down through the trees,
she caught glimpses of water and a red scar of rock on the other cliff.
The sound of a steamer's paddles threshing the water came to her
clearly, and the crying of the gulls was so familiar that she hardly
noticed it. And all the way she was thinking of Francis Sales, his
absurdity, his good looks and his distress; but in the permanence of